


“Since the gods gave me this man to be broken”

by Anonymous



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, The Iliad - Homer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Prisoner of War, Sexual Slavery, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Unreliable Narrator, healing factor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:20:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24864442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “O friends, leaders and counselors of the Achaeans;since the gods gave me this man to be broken,who committed evil deeds, more than all the other Trojans together…”Fourteen days after his son is dragged off behind a chariot, the king of Troy arrives to ransom the corpse.There is no corpse. There is a living man who wishes for death.(Or, certain gods use a cheat code on Hector)
Relationships: Achilles/Hector (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Non-Consensual Pairings
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40
Collections: Anonymous





	“Since the gods gave me this man to be broken”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a comment on fail_fandomanon: "What if Hector survived and Achilles took out his rage in flogging him - only for the gods to heal Hector, as in canon they'd healed his corpse? Then it might be time to consider ways to hurt that'll last longer than physical pain."
> 
> Mostly Iliad-compliant, but the canon divergence draws from the version mentioned in _Ajax_ , in which Hector dies in the process of being dragged.
> 
> Summary quote and title is from Book XXII of the _Iliad_ , translated by Caroline Alexander.

The bloodied meat trailing after Achilles’ chariot was still moving weakly after he drew the horses to a halt. He would think, later, that that was when he should have noticed something amiss. He didn’t notice. He thought only that the soul within that wreck of a body would suffer that much longer. So he cut it loose and flung it to the ground beside where he’d laid out Patroclus, and went about the preparations for a funeral feast. From time to time someone would turn their head to where it twitched and shuddered with breath, but nobody spoke of it. Not then.

After the feast, after meeting with Agamemnon, after Patroclus visited him in the night, after he brought the men around him to renew their tears, after Dawn had begun to raise her hand over them – after that someone, he never knew which of them, looked to where one body lay in state and the other lay in the dust. He screamed.

Achilles jerked round with the rest, dreading the worst – that a pack of dogs, perhaps, had slipped past his mother’s guard – and wishing bitterly that he had agreed to lay Patroclus to rest before such a thing could come to pass. But Patroclus lay just as he was. It was Hector who struggled to his feet, who stood there in one sandal and the rags of his once-fine tunic, who stared back at them wild-eyed and opened his mouth to speak.

Anything he said was drowned in Achilles’ own cry of rage, was choked to nothing when Achilles’ hands closed around his throat. He bore him back into the dust, wringing his neck, slamming his head against the ground until Hector’s hands stopped their desperate scrabbling and fell limp with the rest of him. Then Achilles sat back, panting, and took him in at his leisure.

He was dirtied, of course, from the fall, from the struggle, but far less than he should be – than he had been. His clothes were nearly dyed brown with old blood, yet not a dried drop remained on his body. His open wounds – so many as to form a single sprawling all-encompassing one – had closed, vanished utterly, leaving only the new scrapes. Achilles pressed on the lids and confirmed that both eyes were again set firmly in his skull. For some reason that was what unsettled him the most – he was sure the left eye had been lost on the Trojan plain, same as the right sandal, and how would it have found its way back?

He had no time for this. Patroclus _would_ have his due.

He found a discarded, severed length of the swordbelt he’d strung through Hector’s now-whole ankles, stiff with blood, and used it to bind them together anew. When he was done with that another of his Myrmidons approached with fresh rope extended in a trembling hand. He used that on the wrists, wrenching it to bite into the skin as Hector began to groan and stir.

He contemplated cutting his throat and throwing him onto Patroclus’s pyre alongside the twelve prisoners he had taken for the purpose, but decided against it. To be given to the fire, to have any part of rites for the honored dead, was too good a fate. He contemplated, too, simply putting an end to him on the spot, but something stayed his hand. A presentiment, perhaps, of what would happen when he did – what would happen, that night.

***

That night he decided that if Hector’s body would not serve as a burnt sacrifice, his blood might still serve as a libation. He had him dragged over by his bound arms, barefoot and near naked. All day he’d left Hector trussed outside in the center of his camp, free to be derided and abused by anyone coming to pay their respects – there weren’t as many fresh marks on him as Achilles had hoped for, but there were some. The men dumped him to the ground and left quickly. He thought nothing of it, then.

Hector’s lips were dry and cracked to the touch, his eyes sunken and glassy in the firelight. He looked past Achilles at the pyre – maybe at the Trojan corpses around the edge, which for now still had their shape – and said nothing. Not with his mouth, not with his face, not with his body. Achilles remembered the convulsive little gasps, remembered the terror-white eyes as Hector realized what he meant to do, remembered one hand grasping at air in a final plea for mercy.

Nothing now, not at all, not even when Achilles buried his hand in dark hair matted with dried blood, pulled the head back to stretch the column of the neck, unsheathed his dagger and raised it to catch the light. It wasn’t until the blade opened his throat that Hector’s eyes widened, his limbs jerked. He made the familiar wet desperate sound of a man trying to breathe through his own blood and Achilles afforded him a smile.

But the sound didn’t stop. The blood gushed past Hector’s collarbone over a chest that continued to rise and fall, soaking into the same patch of ground where Achilles had poured out cup after cup of wine in offering. As time passed the bloody breaths steadied, strained though they remained – an exertion, but a simple one. The fear drained from Hector’s upward gaze. It became calm again, perhaps more than calm – perhaps _satisfied_.

Achilles dropped him in the dirt and thought of sawing his head from his body, his limbs from his trunk, of scattering the lot between the Scamander and the sea. He stayed his hand. Not, so he would assure himself, because he feared it wouldn’t work, but because even before he knew it, another idea had taken root and begun to sprout.

The idea grew all through the night as Hector gurgled and bled and gurgled and bled – gone slack eventually, the blood seeping instead of gushing, but still making that _noise_ exactly the same as before each time Achilles paced by. It had formed a loose-furled bud by the time dawn broke, when Achilles turned to complete his last circuit of the pyre and noticed the silence.

He stared at the line of Hector’s throat, as pristine as the rest of him, and the bud unfurled. The gods, he thought, cryptic though they were about it, had given him a gift indeed.

***

It took him more time to figure out how to make the best use of that gift. That day, too, he had little time to spare, so he began simply, ordering a frame assembled of the timber left over from building the pyre. He hung Hector by his wrists so that he had to point his feet for his toes to brush the ground, then flogged him bloody on both sides and left him on display for the funeral games. He’d noticed the signs of dehydration had gone with the rest of the wounds, so there would be no water, and certainly no food (he remembered whining Lycaon, trying to pretend that the hank of bread Patroclus passed into his hands before they put him on the slaver’s ship was the shield of hospitality).

The games could have gone better – half the chariot racers collided with one another on the turn, Odysseus twisted an ankle during the wrestling and had to sit out the footrace, one of the archers loosed his arrow into the leg of an onlooker – but the winners gladly accepted their prizes. He offered some of them the whip as well, but they all politely declined. “There is no way,” said Odysseus, “that I could match the strength of your arm.”

“I fear,” said Teucer, “my talents don’t lie with tools such as this.”

“I do wonder,” said Nestor, “did you learn the whip at the knee of Peleus, or of Chiron?”

Of course this wasn’t in Chiron’s lessons. He had to guess his own way through. He guessed right with the seawater – Hector had done no more than grunt under the whip, but the bucketfuls Achilles flung over the wounds after the games made him open his eyes and scream. Achilles left him there for the night, salt crusting on his body.

***

On the third day he experimented with rods of various widths, with knives, with hot irons. Late in the morning a nervous Automedon let him know that the noise was disturbing the men and he moved his work from the courtyard into the wooden lodge, into the back room. Through Automedon, he also found someone who would trade for a bedstead. He hadn’t bothered with one before – far simpler to lay out a wide stretch of bedding which Patroclus could slip into as he liked, perhaps with his woman. But a bed with a frame provided convenient points to anchor rope and chain (later he would suppose that already, another notion had begun to grow from a seed of the first). And it was wide enough to hold even a man of Hector’s size with his splayed limbs stretched to the corners.

He also thought of the blindfold, then. He might have simply put out Hector’s eyes with the irons, but he liked the look of them stretched wide with the white surrounding the dark center, and wanted to be sure of seeing them whenever the urge struck. Meanwhile the folded black cloth kept Hector rigid and gritting his teeth in constant anticipation, unable to predict the nature or direction of the next pain, unable to know how long it would be before he was again made whole.

But he _was_ made whole – that was the blessing, and that was the curse. On the morning of the fourth day, as he had on the third, Hector awaited him with a straight back and a raised head and eyes that would surely be staring into his without the blindfold, with no old injury or hunger or weariness to linger and weigh him down. A stone might eventually be worn away even by water, but not if it were constantly exchanged for a fresh one.

So. Chiron had surely taught him logic as simple as _if this, then that_. If attacking the body wasn’t the way, where else was there to strike? What gap in ill-fitted armor, what soft underbelly?

***

He considered fucking him over a table in the courtyard for everyone to watch, and afterward was glad he didn’t. Thus far Hector had done little more than hold up his head and endure. Once Achilles’ hand moved lower than his back and _groped_ and he realized what would follow… he had no chance of success, bound and blinded in the middle of camp, but the gods had maintained his strength along with his health and that combined with animal panic made his resistance stronger than Achilles had expected – strong enough to be embarrassing, if anyone else had seen. He wasted no breath screaming for help that no one would give or making protests that would be ignored – Achilles repaid him in kind, and their slamming about the lodge was accompanied by an eerie quiet. Another man with strength still in him might be rendered pliant by a mere blade at the throat, but Hector knew it was not death he had to fear.

Again he ended up knocking Hector’s head bloody on the floor before dragging him to the bed and binding him in place. On his back for now, folded in two with his ankles tied to the bedposts above his wrists. He took off the blindfold – if there was ever a time to look into those eyes, it was now.

And those eyes – dazed at first, with blood trickling past, then wide again, and saying all the things that Hector’s stubbornly closed mouth didn’t. The disbelief, the fear, the hatred – and then they closed in humiliation as Hector turned his face away, trying to deny him any sign of pain. When Hector finally opened his eyes again they refused to fix on him, stared past him at the ceiling.

It wasn’t very good as sex went. He’d only used spit to ease the way and while Hector got the worst of that he was so tight as to rub Achilles’ cock half-raw. For what it was, it was perfect.

***

Perfection could be improved. So he learned over the days and nights that followed.

The mouth had seemed out of the question, with no conceivable threat that would keep Hector from biting down. But there were devices for such things, he learned from men who presented them with awkward smiles – devices he’d never needed with his women. An iron ring strapped into the mouth, keeping the teeth from coming together, allowed him to slide his cock so far inward and downward that Hector gagged and retched up bile and fought for air he forgot he didn’t need.

When Achilles didn’t want his mouth, he could replace the ring with a phallus of wood or ivory – a reminder, a continual degradation. These also proved useful on the other end. However much he loosened Hector, the gods would make him tight again. Such substitutes kept him open and ready for use without fumbling preparations. Too, Achilles could amuse himself testing how far he could be opened, how much it would take for him to scream, how loudly he would proceed to scream at the next stretch, how long before he lost his voice. Another man would have died several times over from some of the ways he tore Hector, whether promptly from bleeding out onto the bed or lingering over days from festering wounds in the gut. That was the fun of it. And as a method of pain it was better than the whip or such mundane instruments, because there was no pride or honor at all to be gleaned from being filled by another man up to the elbow.

Then there were the regular fucks, at least once early in the day and another late at night, more scattered throughout. On his back so he couldn’t hide his shame, on his knees like a dog, on his stomach like a whore. There was a pleasure in both the sound he made and in the stifling of it, in the way Hector struggled as if this once it would do the trick and in the way he struggled and tightened still further when a pillow was pressed to his face. Achilles was rarely called away from his pastime. Nothing stirred in the direction of Troy, and there was little to do beside maintain conditions.

He began to sleep in the bed, enjoying the idle contact of their bodies as much as Hector detested it. He repositioned it lengthwise against the wall, to crowd him and deny him even the temporary escape of falling to the floor. He had two different ways to tie him for the night. Gagged, wrists bound behind his back and ankles together – allowing him to curl into himself like a wounded animal. Or wrists to the head of the bed and ankles to the foot, holding him taut and helpless to do more than turn and writhe, his mouth free but the rest of him well in place. Achilles was careful, always, of what those teeth could do to a man unaware. Not that he believed Hector could rip out his throat in the night, but at this stage it was important to deny him the smallest semblance of victory.

Sometimes he lay very still and watched Hector with one eye when the other man thought he was alone with himself – Hector was always blindfolded at night, in part to facilitate this. He would bury his face in the sheets, shuddering. He would rock himself in each direction as his bonds permitted and hum in his throat, like a motherless child trying to put himself to sleep.

***

Before dawn on the eleventh day, he heard a thirst-dulled voice say “Please don’t,” and pricked his ears.

“Have I ever failed to show you honor?” Hector lay with his back turned, his hands clenched above him. “Have I offended you so grievously? Let me die, I beg you, let me die, let me _die_ –”

Achilles lay silent and was soon rewarded by a lengthy bout of wretched sobs that he savored for as long a length of time after they faded. When he finally made his presence known, when he ran his fingers over the soaked-through blindfold, he said nothing of it. But in the middle of the first fuck of the day he said, “You were made for this.”

Hector shook his head nearly imperceptibly and pressed his lips together. He was on his knees, legs folded and bound to sprawl on either side of Achilles’ lap. A long rope knotted at his neck and passed up through a ring in the ceiling, then lowered to wrap around Achilles’ wrist in easy reach to grab and pull, keeping him upright and moving on Achilles’ cock. Not with especial vigor, but for now a leisurely pace would do.

“Everything,” said Achilles, “every moment of your life, whether or not you knew it, has been to prepare you for me. The gods themselves shaped you to fit my cock, and delivered you into my hands to use as I see fit.

“I might grow old,” he said – an incredible idea, that, but Hector didn’t need to know how incredible when there was a point to make. “Even so, you’ll remain like this. Always ready for me, always put back in your place, always tight as a virgin, always – always – always –”

And he pulled the blindfold up over Hector’s brow so he could press his lips over each rivulet of tears.

***

After that morning Hector did not exactly cooperate – certainly not participate – but he stopped fighting him past instinct, which was less interesting in some ways but more satisfying in others. Achilles began to consider whether he might use his mouth without the iron ring.

In the meantime he turned his attention to other metals, other rings. He ran hot needles through flesh again, left and right, ears and chest, this time following with women’s jeweled droplets and golden hoops from his stores. Dawn healed the piercings but didn’t expel their contents. Other ornaments as well – from a finely etched armlet to a purple ribbon to hold back his thick dark hair. Hector recoiled when Achilles held up the mirror, understanding that another layer of pretense that he was anything more than he was had been stripped away.

He began to bring him out to kneel beside his chair when he ate. He entertained few guests now, other men being as superstitious as they were, intimidated by such obvious divine intervention, but they came when he asked, and his women set the table and served the wine. While Hector didn’t require food he did grow hungry over the course of the day, and it was amusing to watch him put his face blindly to the floor for a scrap of bread or meat while the others barked out laughter, louder than Achilles had heard them laugh before. And then there was wine, poured into him from the jug as his throat worked to swallow fast enough. It left him slack afterward, looser than from mere acquiescence, less able to suppress the emotions that wracked his face and shook his body, more inclined to weep – and even, on the night of the thirteenth, to press himself against Achilles. Achilles allowed it; any comfort he had from it would be more than repaid by his shame in the morning.

***

On the morning of the fourteenth day his mother came to him saying nonsense about Zeus and blasphemy and ransom and he replied more harshly than he intended. After she left, her darkest veil pulled over her face, he turned to Hector still stretched out across the bed and said “I hope that gave you no foolish notions.”

Hector shook his head, not looking at him.

Because of his mother’s visit, he wasn’t surprised that night when word came to him of a Trojan envoy with a wagonload of treasures. What surprised him was that King Priam himself had come, with no companion but his driver – and that he’d made it so far without being mobbed. The messenger shifted his gaze about and said that Ajax – Ajax the son of Telamon – had accompanied him most of the way through the camp.

Ajax was still in the courtyard when Achilles stepped outside – Ajax and Teucer. Ajax loomed over the old man; Teucer was shorter than his brother, of course, but he seemed to be making an especial effort not to loom. A silent crowd of spectators had gathered – so silent that he heard Ajax say, “Your own people must have told you this is madness so I won’t repeat it.”

He could barely hear Priam’s tremulous voice. “Zeus has promised me his protection.”

“Uncle,” said Teucer, nearly as low. Which was not false – Achilles knew that his mother was a Trojan princess, Priam’s sister, taken as a war prize in Heracles’ siege of Troy. But Teucer was not usually inclined to remind people of this. “I pray that the gods never protect you as they protected Prince Hector.”

Achilles stepped back inside and reseated himself, Hector at his feet. Let the king come to him.

And the king came, begging – _the beggar king,_ so Achilles’ uncle Telamon had called him, in his war stories. At the first word that came shaking from his mouth Hector jerked up his head. “Father,” he croaked. Achilles considered striking him into silence, and decided against it. “Get away – away from here – go –”

The old man was struck dumb for so long Achilles began to wonder if the sight had given him a palsy. Then he swallowed, visibly, and managed to press onward, approaching on his knees, hands outspread. The contents of the wagon, he said, were the ransom for a dead man. For the return of his living son, they were only a beginning. The remaining contents of his treasury, the horses in his stables, a plethora of land and trade concessions – everything, so Achilles thought, short of his palace and his maiden daughters. For this he would end the war on the most demeaning of terms, guarantee Helen’s return –

“What is Helen to me?” Achilles snapped. “Can you return the son of Menoetius? Can you put him back together from ash and pour his breath and soul into his body? Then I want nothing of yours.” Then he corrected himself, as he stood and moved out of the old man’s supplicating reach – “Nothing _more_ of yours.”

The few men dining with him had turned their chairs to watch. More peered in from the open door, craning to see past solid grim-faced Ajax and Teucer half-behind him as always. He remembered how these men had cheered on the old priest who came to ransom his daughter from Agamemnon. No such cheers now, no coaxing to take those fripperies and spit on Patroclus’s ashes. They knew (so he thought) the rightness of his cause.

As you will, the old man said. All will be as you say. Yet, if you could find it in your heart to permit one small indulgence, if you could allow a father to take leave of his child, to hold him a final time –

Yes, yes, said Achilles, to shut him up. He had nothing in particular against the old man, aside from siring such a creature. Let him have that much.

They met on their knees. Priam lifted up the blindfold before draping his wide cloak about them both, like a hen putting her wing over a chick. He heard Hector say “I’m not worth this, Father, I –” and then nothing more of what passed between them. He could see, though, when Priam embraced Hector for long moments, when he took Hector’s face between his hands and leaned forward so that their foreheads touched, when he moved those hands to rest atop Hector’s shoulders and regarded him with… Achilles remembered, suddenly, his father’s hands on his shoulders, his father looking on him from above, saying how he’d grown, what a fine boy he was becoming – and he took a long step forward and yanked Hector away by the hair.

They both knew better than to protest the abrupt end to the interview. Teucer helped the old man get up and stumble out. For once Ajax was the one to follow Teucer; he stopped in the doorway, looked back, frowned reproachfully, and was gone. There were few smiles at the table, after that, and no laughter. He retired early, taking Hector with him, and held on to him through the night, kissing him when he cried.

***

The old man didn’t leave it at that. He went scurrying to the other kings, appealing to Odysseus for his tongue, to Menelaus for his sentiments, to Agamemnon for his greed. And by midday of the fifteenth day Odysseus was at his door, speaking so reasonably about how this agreement would benefit the entire army, how in exchange for one broken man they could obtain the cause of their grievance and the bulk of the spoils of Troy with no further effort.

“And that’s how you like it, isn’t it, you craven?”

Odysseus shrugged it off. “I would say the past nine years have been price enough.”

“You would say it. I wouldn’t. Tell Menelaus he can trade his own spoils for his own wife. _I_ never courted her. _I_ never made any vow.” Even Diomedes, a stripling yet to avenge his father upon Thebes, already half-betrothed to an Argive princess, had offered her a bunch of flowers.

Odysseus gave him a meaningful look that irked him all the more for not knowing what the meaning _was_. “I’m certain you haven’t.”

He sent Odysseus away without offering hospitality. The men were nervous, after, fearing that everyone else – anxious for the war’s end – would turn upon the Myrmidons. Some went so far as to say that perhaps the gods had meant their favor for _Hector_ , not for him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told them, a hand on the hilt of his sword. And to the fearful ones he said “None of them would dare challenge me.” But they didn’t heed him, though they claimed to, and he was in a thoroughly foul humor when the boy knocked at the door.

The boy was freckled and gangling, with purple cloth draped over his shoulder and both arms clutching a massive amphora. He had to be five or ten years younger than Achilles, too young to fight when the war began. “For you, my lord,” he said, and moved one arm to show the bangles and bracelets piled there, the fingers full of rings. “It’s not much but it’s the best of my share from Lyrnessus.”

Surely Odysseus didn’t think this paltry offering would tip the scale. “What do you want?”

The boy lowered his gaze, one foot tracing circles in the dust. “I heard… I wanted to see… would you let me fuck him?”

Achilles grinned and pulled the door wide. “Come in.”

***

The jewelry shed from the skinny arm was well-worked gold and silver. The purple tunic and cloak were fit for kings. The wine brimming in the amphora was excellent. Sinon had gathered little compared to others, but with a trader’s discernment.

For the boy was called Sinon of Corinth. He was the son of his parents’ old age, their considerable wealth all being portioned off to his older brothers, and to seek his fortune he sailed to Troy at the start of the war, a half-grown child who carried cups and saw to the accounts, in the retinue of his distant relative Palamedes. Palamedes… wasn’t he the one who took bribes from Priam, several years back? Sinon grimaced, knowing his thoughts. “Yes,” he said. “I had no part of it. Even Odysseus agreed I was too young for that. Well, I managed.” His face lit when Achilles offered him a cup of the wine.

Sinon proved so adoring an audience as to verge on sycophantic – but, so he explained with a blush, it was hard not to be sycophantic to the best of the Achaeans. And after the likes of Agamemnon and Odysseus and even his cousin Ajax, at least someone was giving him his proper due. There was no one else in the lodge – even the women had made themselves scarce, leaving Achilles to fetch bread and dried meat and the fruits from Lemnos for them to share – but they passed the time alone quite easily, Sinon telling amusing stories of Corinthian politics and how his father got the better of Odysseus’s grandfather, and Achilles was the one who had to remind him of what he’d first come for. “Oh,” he said, blushing again, “Oh, of course.”

“How would you like him?”

He’d kept Hector tied to the bed for most of today, to keep him from hearing any further nonsense. Because Sinon preferred it, he brought him out without the blindfold or gag. That way they both had a full view of his face as he realized what else Achilles had come up with, as he resigned himself to being whored out to a boy young enough to be his son – a boy he would have swatted flat on the battlefield. Sinon wanted something approximating a hands-and-knees position, so they had him kneel at a bench and rest his upper body upon it, keeping his back straight. Achilles roped him there, spread his legs and tied them in place. He poured himself another cup of wine, and offered more to Sinon. Sinon declined – he was smaller, weaker, and feared any more would render him soft beyond remedy.

Achilles lay back on a nearby couch, drinking with one hand and working at his own hardness with the other. Sinon took his time, exploring the body laid out for him with soft strokes that somewhere else would have looked gentle, reverent, in the same way that he breathed, “You are beautiful.” He toyed with Hector’s hanging cock, which Achilles would never have considered on his own, but at the sound of Hector’s betrayed little moan he added it to his arsenal.

Hector said something with a pleading note. “What was that?” murmured Sinon, and leaned forward and down, laying his chest flush with Hector’s back, to hear the answer. They whispered back and forth, Hector urgent, Sinon soft and even. Achilles almost envied that Hector would speak to – would beg – Sinon and not him, but that only made sense. Hector didn’t know Sinon, and could hope for mercy.

Some other time Achilles might have grown impatient, especially when Sinon pulled the purple ribbon loose and began to comb Hector’s hair with his fingers like a maid would a lady’s. But it suited the air of lassitude that had fallen over the proceedings. Achilles slowed his pace with one hand and reached out with the other, intending to place the near-empty cup on the table.

The cup dropped from his hand, hit the table, rolled, and fell to the floor, scattering the lees. Sinon glanced over – a sharp, appraising stare – and straightened, drawing the knife at his belt.

As if through water, he watched Sinon cut Hector loose from the bench, cut the rope between his hands. He watched him step away and return with the fine garments he’d brought. He watched him help Hector sit up and lift his arms, slide the tunic over his head, clasp the cloak around his body. “I couldn’t think of shoes,” he heard him apologize, and then laugh. “Well, I’m already stealing his prisoner, why not his shoes?”

“The wine?” said Hector, still wary, drawing up the tunic to take the rings from his chest. “You drank it as well.”

“I did,” said Sinon, bringing over Achilles’ sandals. “And drank the antidote, before I came to his door.” He tied them on Hector’s feet as the rings dropped to the floor, then the jewels, then the armlet. “Now come. The kings await.”

Achilles managed to snarl as they passed, even if he couldn’t manage to turn it into words. Hector cringed and pulled the cloak tighter around himself but Sinon smiled at him, quite amiable. “My father outwitted Death itself,” he said. “You’re nothing at all next to that.”

***

It was nearly sunset by the time his limbs were back in working order. No one else had entered through the door Sinon left open. When he went to it and looked out the courtyard was deserted, but not far away he could hear men shout and laugh.

He thought he could hear his mother weep, feel her pulling at him. He brushed her off. There was a chance, still, to earn his promised glory. He stepped outside, drawing his sword –


End file.
